News

Dreams survive the sale

Bill Shankly felt that at a football club the manager, the players and the supporters formed an inviolable trinity. Directors he regarded as existing on a lower plane. Their main function, he once told me, should be to put their signatures on cheques. "Just to sign them, mind ye," he emphasised. "Not to make them out. We'll take care of that."

If Bill's vision seems crazily surreal now, it didn't exactly impress as a model of practicality four decades ago. But at least back then his poetic imagination roamed a social landscape where such dinosaur concepts as a close connection between footballers and their fans still existed. Today players are separated from the huge majority of those following their exploits by lifestyles as different as a Ferrari and a Ford Escort, or a magnum of Cristal and a pint of bitter.